Wanting Images

What the picture awakens our desire to see, as Lacan might put it, is exactly what it cannot show. This impotence is what gives it whatever specific
power it has.
1

Lieko Shiga, Remember that? from the series Canary (2007)

Be shot and die.

The photographic paper is the evidence. The image printed on it had a smell, like something still fresh, as it appeared before my eyes. If the time axis of
this world exists inside the photograph, then I am standing completely outside of it, and in order to escape from the uncertainty of the “present” which is
both indecisive and elusive, I search desperately for some clue of an axis that definitely exists. Time moves forward towards my death, and the act of
creating a moment of stationary time, as opposed to passing time, is something akin to prayer; the image establishes itself in line with a strong desire
for and attachment to the existence of something opposed to self.

When photographing, I create a device to produce chance events, waiting to be shot by the camera at a moment that is impossible to predict in order to lose
control over the images I may intentionally hold. The verb “shoot” is used to describe the action of taking a photograph, but the same word is also used to
mean “kill”, therefore, therefore to be shot is to be resurrected through the action of killing. I can already visualize the finished photograph when I
first encounter the subject or scene, or even before that. The time that exists before the photograph is taken, shoots me where I stand outside, and
restores me to life.

The body is simply a medium, I kept a canary inside my stomach.

Look upon people or scenery that have been sacrificed through photography as offerings to the next world (Lieko Shiga, Canary, 2007) 2

I begin this blog entry by bringing together three aesthetic moments that, for me, express the particular qualities of pedagogy and desire that I have been
exploring with Wanting Images so far. By placing these three moments in conversation – the quote
from Mitchell, Shiga’s image Remember that? and her artistic statement for Canary – I am interested in what is provoked by their juxtaposition
and with how this positioning shapes the experience of looking. More directly, I want to explore the free associative possibilities of an orientation to
looking that makes room, as Mitchell (1996) phrases it, for pictures to awaken our desire to see while refusing to show. It is frequently the case that art
criticism is encountered, whether deliberately or unwittingly, as a set of instructions in how to look and what to see; the artist statement is often taken
up in much the same way. The result is a foreclosure rather than an opening of one’s experience of looking. Indeed, while some textual responses to images
feel more didactic than pedagogical in their address, the invitation to look alongside the critic and/or the artist begs a willingness to be animated by
their provocations. My effort with this entry is therefore to experiment with what happens when we read a theoretical concept, a photographic image and an
artist statement together as a free associative activity.

My understanding of free association is gleaned from psychoanalytic approaches to the study of knowledge and interpretation. A strategy key to the analytic
dialogue, free association is a speculative exercise of being with one’s thoughts, feelings and utterances without rhetorical purpose, direction or
limitation. In psychoanalysis the instruction is simply for the analysand to utter whatever comes to mind. A unique narrative practice that breaks with
the rules of temporality, free association is, according to Deborah Britzman, “a train of thought, a way of training thought to derail itself ” and so to
“give up, however briefly, one’s sense of reality in the world, one’s sense of actuality and its limits, and one’s sense that language can be controlled…”3. Like trains, thoughts too can be derailed, but only if efforts are taken to skirt the confines of
conscious control. In the analytic sense then, free association is an effort both to reveal and to get around the restrictive and/or repressive elements of
thought. It does so by favoring the impulse or urge towards symbolization over its certitude. I’m curious as to the usefulness of this method for looking
at images, particularly with regard to how a free associative orientation might open new ways of encountering oneself in relation to aesthetic objects.
Returning to the three aesthetic moments that I introduced at the beginning of this blog entry, I now test of this method of looking by elaborating some of
my own provisional thoughts.

I first encountered Lieko Shiga’s photograph Remember that?” in a virtual exhibit on Time LightBox, which featured selections from
her 2007 series Canary. Flicking through the images I was struck by their enigmatic quality: reality and fiction seemed measured in increments of
luminosity, meaning emerging somewhere along their blurred edge. Wanting to learn more about the photographs and how they were made, I visited Shiga’s website. While perusing the Canary project archive, I happened to notice that
the title for Remember that? was different on the Time LightBox version: the interrogative had been rewritten as the declarative Remember that. I don’t
know why my mind was drawn to this small detail and nor do I know which is the more accurate translation. The dropped question mark, however, completely
altered my reading of the image. With Remember that? I interpreted the man’s gesture – index and middle finger pointed self-referentially towards his own
skull – as directing the question of what it is that one can remember. The amorphous light colonizing (emanating from?) his face seemed poised to both
consume and illuminate the memories that might be contained within. The declarative title, however, produced a more trenchant reading: “You. Must. Remember. That.” With this interpretation my gaze was drawn to the man’s slightly opened mouth, which appears to be either consuming or emitting
some sort of glowing ectoplasmic entity. Following Mitchell’s understanding of the power of the image as resting in what it refuses to tell, what is it
that Remember that? cannot show and yet awakens one’s desire to see? By allowing myself a free associative reading of the image in relation to the title
text, I wonder if I came closer to limning the contours of this desire than had I first turned to the critical writing and interviews that illuminate the methods and thinking behind
Shiga’s work.

Shiga’s artistic statement for Canary lends itself to a similar kind of reading. “Be shot and die,” she writes…“The photographic paper is the
evidence.”4 With these two statements I get the impression of the photograph as the visual remainder of a
moment in time wrenched onto paper: something has died and yet its inanimate trace lives on. Playing with the dual meaning of the verb “to shoot”, Shiga
notes that it describes the action of taking both a photograph and a life. And yet this rather violent characterization seems to create a productive rather
than destructive relation to her work: “The time that exists before the photograph is taken”, she relates, “shoots me where I stand outside, and restores
me to life”. While I can’t be sure what any of this really means, what I find interesting is how her textual address models a particular way of thinking
about looking. Because of its opacity, her artist statement tells me neither how to look nor what to see, siding instead with the power of the enigmatic
form. “Look upon people or scenery that have been sacrificed through photography”, she tells us, “as offerings to the next world”. It is perhaps this “next
world” to which we might be opened with a free associative orientation to looking.

Writer and scholar Sara Matthews contributes a series of blog posts to TPW R&D Online. Entitled Wanting Images, the series explores the relation between art, pedagogy and desire. Taking the form of a conversation with various images, visual projects and curatorial strategies, the intent is to explore the notion of what constitutes a pedagogical encounter in looking and to consider the methodological dilemmas raised by such provocations.

Writer Biography

Sara Matthews is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her interdisciplinary work brings cultural and aesthetic theory to the study of violence and social conflict. Her current research considers how contemporary Canadian War Artists are responding to Canada's mission in Afghanistan. In addition to her academic work, Sara curates aesthetic projects that archive visual encounters with legacies of war and social trauma. Her critical writing has appeared in PUBLIC, FUSE Magazine and in exhibition essays for the Art Gallery of Bishops University and YYZ.